How To Maintain Your Cool Instantly Super Fast To NOT Get Burned Out

Do you want to know how to maintain your cool instantly so you don’t end up in an extremely stressful situation?

If so, read on to know exactly what you need to do right now to make this happen super fast.

Follow Your Gut

Be honest.

Deep down, you know losing your cool is not the right thing to do.

If you are not convinced, a lot of bad and catastrophic things will happen if you do not follow your gut in this case.

1. You might go to jail

Especially if you’ve drinks that night and you got into some bullshit argument.

You might punch a girl, you might get drunk and drive home unsafely, you might do some crazy shit that can backfire on you pretty fast.

As a result, you will get punished for it and rightfully so.

2. You might lose your job and reputation

This crazy shit that you’d be doing will force your employer to take a step back and say “Wait a minute. Is this what we paid for? Some butt head who goes to the bar and gets arrested and makes us look bad? He outta here!”

And they have every reason to fire you.

You became a liability.

And this one is the worst of them all:

3. Your friends will no longer trust you

If you lose your friends over something you couldn’t calm down about, you will be screwed for the long run.

If you need a hand, they will no longer be there for you.

Why?

Because you became such a creep in their eyes that they cannot stand being around you.

Listen to me man (or woman), your gut is right when it tells you to not go on that tirade.

Unless the guy is threatening to take your life on the spot, don’t fight it.

Just take a deep breath, a step back and walk away.

This is how to keep your cool in an argument or if you are on the verge of getting into a fight.

You’ll thank yourself sooner or later for doing that.

Now after you take that step back, your next step should be this:

Drink Water

Water is good for you.

Not coffee, not beer (especially not a Corona) and most certainly, not your freaking Red Bull.

Water.

Let me tell you why.

Don’t you feel instantly relaxed when you drink a sip of water and all of the stress goes away?

If so, then you know that when you drink it, you don’t feel compulsive and you don’t feel like the Hulk on steroids combined with a mentally unhealthy Darth Vader.

In fact, research has shown that drinking water will reduce your anxiety and will get you to relax instantly when you are in a stressful situation.

The reason for this is because when you are dehydrated, a stress hormone called cortisol goes up. When cortisol goes up, you increase your stress and hence, you increase your tendency to make impulsive decisions.

And that’s why you punched that guy or gal at the bar for no apparent reason aside from the fact that you were mad.

So the next time you are stressed for no apparent reason, you are in a pointless argument where you are losing your temper or right before bed, drink water instantly.

You’ll be glad that you did.

Now you’ve taken a step back and you’ve drank water.

What next?

Work on Something Else

This is especially relevant when you are at work or you are at school with a hard problem set and you just don’t have any ideas as to what to do to compete your task.

This is known as the brick wall. Your conscious mind is telling you “I have nothing else to recall. Give the task to the subconscious so it can come up with something.”

The reason it’s telling you this is because somewhere in the back of your head, you know it.

The brain just needs to go back in its shed and do some tricks to find the answer.

Or, it will use your previous experiences in life to come up with the answer magically.

This is what’s known as the incubation process where your subconscious does the work (without your effort) to come up with a solution to a seemingly difficult problem.

Now the problem you might be facing could be an obvious one, but you are not seeing it in the perspective to identify that it is an obvious problem.

But if you keep thinking about it in the narrow view that you have, you won’t be able to see a solution from multiple angles and hence, you will keep banging your head on a wall and you will get frustrated and burned out.

If you let your subconscious do the thinking without your effort and you work on something else, you will find that you are less stressed and more productive and hence, you actually get the answer you are looking for and you aren’t as stressed.

This is what you do to implement incubation:

1. Identify your problem. See if you can actively think about the problem and come up with the solution on the top of your mind.
2. If you can’t come up with an answer, realize what you need to do and move on to something else.
3. Act when you brain gives you a “lightbulb” moment when it tells your gut to use what it found to solve the problem.

Obviously, the best way for you to understand this is to practice these tips when you are stuck on a hard problem.

It is hard to visualize at first because you can’t see what’s going on in my head. As a result, practice is your best bet to understanding what I am saying.

I’ll give you an example of what this looks like.

Watch this clip below and see how this contestant solved the seemingly hard puzzle in 1 second.

As you can see, she didn’t put any thought into it.

When you don’t have a clue, this is what you do.

Just let it sit in the back of your head and all of a sudden at any moment, your answer will pop out.

What happened when she solved the puzzle was her subconscious worked to find a solution to the problem from a different angle without her thinking about it.

THIS is what you do when you don’t have a clue as to how to solve the problem you are given.

Sure, for some things, you need to know the prerequisites for understanding what you are trying to solve. For instance, building a rocket.

Do you think you’ll know how to build a rocket without taking classes in, say, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, orbital mechanics, etc?

Exactly. For something like that, you need the subject matter to even get close to an answer.

But for most things, all you need is to try to solve your problem actively and if you don’t have a clue, let your subconscious do the rest.

For the record, solving the problem actively should take place when the answer is really obvious or if you know what you need to do but you need some time to go through the process you need to follow to arrive at the solution.

You wouldn’t use incubation to solve a puzzle like this:

Now the incubation process leads me to my next point:

Don’t Overthink

Thinking is overrated when you don’t have a clue as to what you are doing.

Only when you know what you are doing you can do this because you are going with the flow of your thoughts that are consistent with what you understand.

But for every other situation, it will ruin you.

Think of the last time you were in a college test when you were blanked out when you saw the question or if you had to decide between 2 restaurants to eat and it took you hours to choose which one to eat at.

Did you think about what to do next?

What happened?

Write in the comments below your response; it’d be pretty interesting to know.

You got it wrong or you took too long to pick a place (and your girlfriend got mad at you).

Why?

Because you overthought the question.

When you overthink something, your mind explodes because it is going through WAY too many options for you to handle.

You endlessly question, run through scenarios and over critique things. In turn, you prevent yourself from taking action on what you want.

This is a really bad course of action.

In fact, research has shown that overthinking things leads to depression and can increase your chances for contracting issues with your arteries later in life. If this were to happen, there would be a problem with the blood flow required to maintain your survival.

This can put your life in jeopardy if it happens.

So if you are overthinking things and you aren’t relaxed as a result, don’t overthink things.

A good indication to know that you are overthinking something is if you sense your brain burning out.

Think of like your brain being cooked up like an egg on a skillet and it’s overheating.

This is the sign of overthinking.

The moment you feel this, don’t even try to solve the problem.

Understand what you need to do and then go do something else.

Like I said before, your subconscious will take care of the rest.

Trust the process.

Now there is something else I’d like to tell you that is extremely important to understand for your future. Your future could depend on this one point right here, so pay close attention.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

There are SO many things in life that don’t matter.

But at the same time, we put too much emphasis on them.

Do you remember the last time when you worried about something like forgetting your phone in your home or forgetting to buy something on your grocery list?

A lot of times, it’s easy to fret about those things and lose sight of what we need to accomplish as a result.

This leads to more stress and anxiety and impatience.

Now, let’s say that you are piling on these small habits consistently and your performance is being affected.

This is where discipline comes in.

Little details DO matter. This is what separates the greats from the mediocre.

The thing is when you make a mistake, you learn about how to do better next time you encounter it. That way, it won’t become an issue again.

And not only do this thing once, but do it consistently so you can build the things you need to achieve something for yourself.

When I say “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” I mean don’t let a negative event consume your mind for a long time thinking that it’s unfair, you are going to change it, etc.

This is counterproductive and you will have a really difficult time getting over it.

This is what happened to many sports teams who after they lost their championship game, they fall into this depression and they can’t get over it and as a result, they have several losing seasons.

Don’t be this person.

Learn from your mistakes and build great habits based on discipline starting today.

Your future self will thank you for it.

Now here’s the final point I want you to do after this post:

SUE YOUR BOSS!

Just kidding 🙂

Get Rid of Your Smartphone

This one might come as a shock to you, but from personal experience and from research, I can tell you that unless you are using the smartphone for business purposes, you should NOT have it at all.

Let me tell you the story about most people with their smartphones.

Smartphones are like credit cards. If use them wrong, they are a time waster in that you could be spending that time on something more productive to your future, hence an opportunity cost of using the smartphone.

Using your smartphone wrong can lead to depression, loss of sleep, blurred vision, ADHD, blurred vision, increased chances for suicide and a decrease in the amount of concentration you can possibly handle. Research supporting this point published in the Journal of Affective Disorders can be seen here.

All of this is like going into debt with your credit card and having to use the time you could be spending on something productive to pay off the debt, not to mention the boatload of stress coming your way when trying to pay off the debt.

Look at anyone in the next major place that you go to whether it’s a mall or a park or a hotel or anywhere for that matter.

What the one thing in their pocket that they all have?

That’s right.

Right then and there, you should know that they are on the wrong track (for the most part).

Why?

Because they are not spending their time effectively.

They waste hours upon hours on that thing consuming stuff they don’t need to consume and as a result, they get nowhere and they become slaves to what is being called the new cigarette.

You can see why this is the case in an article I wrote about getting rid of your smartphone in the article attached to the link.

Now, there is an exception to this rule which requires extreme discipline to follow through with.

This exception is when you are taking the pictures or recording videos required to harmonize with your target audience so you can elevate your brand and boost sales.

This is what YouTube and Instagram/Snapchat stars do to attract an audience to them.

Personally, I’m still figuring out how to do this effectively, but I know for a fact that provided the correct educational resource to show you how to optimize these platforms, you can use the apps and features on a smartphone to grow your brand.

This is known as leverage in that you are using the resource to create business value and a positive return on investment on your time.

However, to make this work, I will say it again. You need discipline.

If you are not disciplined with your time, you will end up wasting it.

The goal is to provide value, not waste time.

Time is money, so look at a smartphone as a business investment more than anything else.

It’s like using the credit card wisely to improve your credit score so you can qualify for a job or a low interest loan on a home or rental properties, which WILL save you a lot of money in the future.

A smartphone is the system nowadays as you can see in this article here, but you MUST be careful with it.

It’s 100% a drug if you use it wrong.

And in case you aren’t aware, you are a business.

Whatever makes up you whether it’s your personality, your hard skills, your soft skills, etc., is a product that you offer to everyone that can create more value for them than the money and/or time they are giving by spending time with you.

If you don’t give people a reason to be with you that delivers this excess value to them, they will NOT want to spend time with you.

They have better things to do.

And let that point marinate in you for a bit there.

It is the truth.

You can verify this point here.

With the obvious exception of suing your boss (in most cases), this list should help steer you in the right direction as soon as possible before your next meltdown.

If you got a lot out of this post and you want to receive more insightful content that will provide you tremendous assistance in improving your productivity and help you reach your full potential ASAP, subscribe to Join the Island, the world’s greatest blog, below with your email and I’ll send you posts straight to your inbox the moment each post is posted!

I hope this article brought a lot of value to you. I REALLY want to see you do well (not just for your money)!

Until next time,

This is Evan signing off.

PS: Comment below with what you got out of the post. It’d be great to hear what type of action you’ll take starting today with this.